Comment

This is no minor meditation! How one feels about things and people and generally what passes as respect or beneath ones contempt or tolerance, are all aspects of the human that gets forged in that early fire of social benefit and class equations. You may well remember the child that you were painfully, or pleasantly, wrestling with such things? Triple distilled free thought, is often far less a default mindset. Triple distilled empathy and the curiosity to understand others position far less often an emotional foundation per se. This is more especially NOT the case when one has been sold out to personal aspirations to breach any concept of lowly status for oneself. Ambition almost is certain to cauterize mind and emotion with a high degree of dismissiveness in at least some quarters, where there likely is good, though hard to bear, reason for the resultant vectors that emerge amongst fellow humans. The strife and the servitude of the less fortunate seem worthy of contemptuous labels - at least for existing at all. Ambition seems therefore almost virtuous, but is also likeliest to be sympathetic to the exact same fellow humans when their station is higher and their wealth and power harbours more fear than weakness in spite of how they often can be measured to be exploiting the very positions of ones loathings - the weak and the powerless. The human mind is to me, almost always; at best a fickle tool of evolution and at worst one intending harm wherever and whenever it can escape unscathed - at someone elses expense or demise.

Freethinking and determinations to bring about things to reduce inequalities, which I'd regularly hoped was most peoples and my own aspirations, more often than not deal us a deadly blow to remind us this is largely a fools errand against the entropy of consumerism: first by requiring us to consider our own demise, the higher up the ladder of power and wealth we already are (equality certainly seeks to regulate this) ; secondly by ridiculing as "foolish" one who in effect squanders their power and affluence due motives which lean on equality and preservation of the natural world (the markets rarely return a profit for such motivations - if ever?) : thirdly because hardly anyone listens or values the powerless and poor (branding them a drain on society) despite this being most often the "guilty burden" many ignore about humanity per se, and lastly because it's power and wealth that is predominantly given priority to secure resources and peoples investments of their time in pretty much doing anything about anything. As such power and wealth will continue to set all agendas and likeliest render them as fickle an allegiance to all the ills of history as ever they were: securing the inequalities privilege already delivered the lifestyles of the "lucky and ambitious" in securing their share in what everything is all about: "the good life"! Often they reinforce this by selling out poor cousins to await death and "the holy life" for their share of what this is. Even more satirically some of them actually think power and affluence their reward in this life for their personal holiness to secure one to come to boot. Nostalgia, both past and to come, never got any more inflated than this!

The good (or holy) life is what the human mind is enslaved to securing and as such is largely servile to its own "brain god", or that grafted by society per se. All thinking seems to me to be corrupted toward collecting these "beans" in the hope of growing a giant beanstalk. All feeling, I think, seems disposed to it. All opposers, I suspect, get branded despoilers of the life worth living - in its various investments. The human brain is largely a slave to the pleasures and desires it can secure that have been forged there as "worth the living". Human minds seek what can at best can be sustained and repeated for the longest periods. In this sense we are all Poppy Heads to various extents. Investors in our own "brain chemicals" that run our "life show" from wherever our position. Altruism is our denial of who we think we are. Hatred is our judgement of how better placed than others we think they think. And in my experience most people are at best reluctant to say anything about exactly what this is or believe anything about how others say they do. Little wonder when one considers where we started, and how "ambition" seems the word on the tips of most neurons, gainfully employed - though to whose gain is in my estimation very questionable indeed.

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The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.